Editors

WhatsApp will stop working on some phones from New Year’s Eve

WhatsApp has become one of the most popular messaging services to date over the past few years due to its ability to work on all devices – something which iMessage does not have.

Some phone users will have to say goodbye to the app from January 1 2018 though.

The service was bought by Facebook in 2016 but 2018 will see it become incompatible for older devices.

The reason behind this is that when the service was founded in 2009, the mobile landscape was very different. Back then, everybody thought a Blackberry was the phone to have but now they are seldom seen.

“About 70% of smartphones sold at the time had operating systems offered by BlackBerry and Nokia,” the company explained.

“Mobile operating systems offered by Google, Apple and Microsoft – which account for 99.5% of sales today – were on less than 25% of mobile devices sold at the time.”